Research

Photo credit: Filippo Ferrari

Research Programme

Broadly speaking, I work primarily on topics in metaphysics and the philosophy of language. In particular, all of my current research deals in some way with truth. Truth seems to be one of those topics that sticks with you, so I expect to continue working on truth in some capacity for most of my career.

I’m very interested in deflationary truth theories. I think that deflationists should pay more attention to metaphysical questions about truth, and I have some thoughts about how they should answer them. I find that my sympathies align most strongly with what I call pure deflationism, according to which there is no such property as truth. I’m currently working out my thoughts on pure deflationism and on how debates about deflationism can be informed by topics such as Russell’s Paradox and the relevance of parsimony to theory choice.

I’ve recently developed a semantics for English taste predicates that is absolutist at both the level of semantic content and the level of truth-value. In doing so, I attempt to show how an absolutist should conceive of faultless disagreement about matters of taste and also explore our ordinary attitudes about such matters, drawing on some recent empirical data.

I’ve devoted a lot of attention to problems that arise in connection with alethic pluralism. My work on this topic, including my dissertation, deals with the nature of domains; mixed discourse; the relations between alethic pluralism, deflationism, and eliminativism about truth; the proper formulation of correspondence pluralism; the nature of platitudes about truth; the scope problem; and the viability of moderate alethic pluralism. I’m still interested in all of these topics.

My other research interests include primitivist truth theories; empirical philosophy; properties; and pragmatism, both classical and contemporary.

Publications

Special issues and edited volumes

Truth: Concept Meets Property, special issue of Synthese on the concept and nature of truth. Forthcoming in 2018.

Pluralisms in Truth and Logic, co-edited with Nikolaj Pedersen and Nathan Kellen. Forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.

Articles and book chapters

Truth in English and elsewhere: an empirically-informed functionalism. To appear in Pluralisms in Truth and Logic.

A critical discussion of two leading arguments for pure deflationism in which I offer what I take to be a stronger argument in favor of this view.

Belief and disagreement about matters of personal taste

A paper in which I argue that disagreement about matters of personal taste should be understood as non-doxastic in nature and explore some significant consequences of this result for debates about the meaning of taste predicates.

Talks: Past and Upcoming

Truth in English and elsewhere: an empirically-informed functionalismDepartmental Colloquium, Texas Christian University; January 2018